IBD Editorials

Obama Uses Emotion And Children As Political Tools

01/18/2013 06:15 PM ET

Demagoguery: Children and grieving parents are far from the only tools President Obama has shamelessly exploited to expand government and curtail freedom. Emotionalism has often been a weapon against liberty.

As jarring as it was to see the president stoop to staging children in the room where he signed executive orders expanding gun control — and bullied Congress to pass gun laws that will do nothing to save children from violent madmen — no one should be shocked at his emotional appeal to the masses even as he takes away their freedoms.

It was not for nothing that candidate Obama all the way back in mid-2007 said his Supreme Court appointments would be based on "empathy" because "we need somebody who's got the heart, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that's the criteria by which I'll be selecting my judges."

Later that year, then-Sen. Obama said he wanted Supreme Court justices who understand "what it means to have the system not work for them." And in 2008 he would cite ultraliberal Chief Justice Earl Warren as an example of judges who "have enough empathy, enough feeling, for what ordinary people are going through."

His first appointment to the high court, Sonia Sotomayor, confirmed in her memoir "My Beloved World," published this week, that she has been a "progressive" bent on radical political change going all the way back to her grade-school days.

From Warren to Sotomayor, this is what "empathy" translates into: new uses of more government by powerful elitists in the name of the downtrodden or the suffering. So it should be no surprise that Obama feels zero shame in high-fiving four awestruck kids who haven't the slightest understanding of the gun violence debate.

Nor should anyone be astonished that he brazenly showboated the parents of one of the child victims of the Newtown massacre by seating them front and center at the event, and announcing that he had hung a painting by their 7-year-old daughter "in my private study just off the Oval Office."

Every time he looks at that painting, according to the president, "I think about the life that she lived and the life that lay ahead of her, and most of all I think about how, when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now."

This is not the skilled communicating at which Ronald Reagan was so gifted; it's another example of Obama's emotional demagoguery. His government takeover of health care, for instance, was the result of playing on people's sympathies for the uninsured, who were supposedly being victimized by big, bad insurers.

But now "what ordinary people are going through" is the pain of soaring premiums as health insurance companies scramble to withstand their new regulatory costs. And there will remain millions of post-ObamaCare uninsured.

Obama pressured Republicans to accept big tax hikes on employers by stoking resentment against the successful. But the result, again, will hurt "ordinary people" the most, worsening the already high unemployment of the Obama economy.

Some observers believe Obama's wish to restrict gun rights will crash into not just the Second Amendment but the sizable number of Democrats who owe a good deal of their support to gun owners, and who presumably intend to remain in lockstep with the GOP on guns.

But this emotionalized, pull-out-all-the-stops appeal suggests that the White House sees a huge political opportunity here — both in terms of enacting yet another item on the leftist agenda, and in demonizing Republicans as anti-children.

What is most disturbing is that the public swallows such emotionalized manipulations so easily. In squashing freedom, a tug on the heart strings can be as effective as a crack of the whip.